January 21, 2023: I leave Clearwater Beach for the sheltered marina at Gulfport, FL.
Okay, I’m finally sitting down to fill in the gaps of my narrative of my entire Great Loop Journey.
This blog includes a complete narrative of my journey from its start at Zitttles Marina in Olympia, WA in early October 2022, through my stay at Clearwater Beach, FL in mid January 2023. I worked my butt off to get the posts done consecutively and really fell behind. I wrote about my January 19-21 stay in Clearwater Beach on April 9, 2023. By that time, I was over a thousand miles away, in Oriental, NC, just finishing up a week-long course to get my Captain’s License. I was burned out and tired of trying to remember details. I was also looking forward to taking a break at home for the summer — I was still working at the time — and figured I’d catch up there.
I didn’t.
Between then and now, I did write up a lot of the time I was on the loop, but this is the first gap I need to fill: the time between Clearwater Beach, FL, and my departure from Do It Now on Kent Island, MD in late April of the same year. Let’s see how much I remember.
– Maria
I spent two nights at Clearwater Beach Marina. If you haven’t read about them, you can find the post here.
According to my Cruising Log notes, I departed Clearwater Beach Marina at 9:45 AM, following the channel back out to the Gulf ICW southbound. The only other thing my notes say is that at 10 AM, I began going through a series of heavily populated areas with lots of No Wake zones.
Here’s the view out my window — it must have been cold out for me to drive from inside. Lots of heavily populated areas.
I don’t have much memory of this specific day — in fact, most of my days in Florida’s ICW tend to blend into each other because of the sameness. Lots of homes right on the water, lots of No Wake zones, and on weekends, lots of day trippers out in their boats with little or no regard for other boaters. In a way, the No Wake zones are good because they protect us from being waked by all too many inconsiderate boaters.
According to my Nebo log, I averaged only 6.8 knots, which makes sense given the No Wake zones. But I also got the boat up to 17.1 knots. Yay, me!
There were lots of condos, like these. My photos app tags them at Long Key.
Part of the channel was very narrow with shallow water on both sides. Plenty of channel markers marked the way. There were drawbridges, but I didn’t need any of them opened; the lowest clearance was 20 feet. Then the waterway opened up to Boca Ciega Bay. I cruised past more homes along the water and then turned to port into the Cats Point Channel.
A short while later, I made another turn to port, following the channel to Gulfport Municipal Marina just west of St. Petersburg. I remember following the channel closely because the water was unusually shallow in the area — Aqua Map charts it as low as 3 feet at low tide outside the channel. I followed the channel closely to enter a narrow passageway between two strips of land.
The marina entrance channel was very narrow. (I shot this a day or two later from land.)
There was some confusion over where I was supposed to go, but they eventually parked me along a floating dock against the wall on the far west side of the marina. According to my log, I arrived at 1 PM, having gone only 21 nautical miles.
The spot they put me in was pretty far away from everyone else, but it was nicely sheltered. That turned out to be a good thing, since the weather was rough enough the next few days to keep me there for three nights.
Here’s my Nebo log for January 21, 2023. Download a PDF log file with more info. Track Do It Now on Nebo.
